Woman's death after being jailed raises questions

Little is known about the events that led to the death of Larra Gillis except that her liver and kidneys failed and her brain activity ceased four days after she was arrested.

Marina police arrested her on the morning of Dec. 4 on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and resisting arrest. She was walking in and out of traffic on Reservation Road near CSU Monterey Bay and police took her to Monterey County Jail.

A toxicology report has not yet been released, but her partner, Donald Villarreal, suspects she might have been high on crack.

“I talked to her that morning and she was high, but she was fine,” he says.

When Villarreal learned Gillis had been arrested, he called the jail to check on her. He says jail staff told him that she was “detoxing” in isolation and that she would soon be booked and housed at the jail. That was the story he was told for three consecutive days.

On Dec. 8, four days after her arrest, two things happened that don’t necessarily jibe: Gillis was released on her own recognizance from the jail and her family received a call from Natividad Medical Center saying she was hospitalized, unconscious and clinging to life.

She had been at the intensive care unit for three days already, the family was told. Hospital spokeswoman Carol Adams confirms Gillis was checked into the hospital on Dec. 5, a day after her arrest.

“The hospital told us the jail wouldn’t let them contact us,” Villarreal says. “We got [to her hospital room] and a guard from the jail was there.”

Jail spokesman John Thornburg says Gillis’ death on Dec. 19, after she spent 11 days on life support, is not considered an in-custody death, although an inmate who falls ill at the jail and later dies at a hospital would be considered one.

“Something happened to her in that jail that was traumatic,” Villarreal says. “She had been in that jail before, she even knew the guards, and she had come out alive. She wasn’t supposed to die.”

Monterey County Assistant Public Defender Don Landis says Gillis never appeared in court for arraignment or had an attorney appointed to her case because she was hospitalized. Criminal charges were never officially dropped, but a death certificate is scheduled to be presented in mid-January to dismiss the case.

But a lot of questions remain. Thornburg declined to go into detail about whether or not Gillis was conscious when she was released from custody, or if she was considered an inmate when she was checked into the hospital.

“I can’t go into details as legal action is sure to follow,” Thornburg says.

Villarreal says he already filed a complaint with the jail and is requesting an investigation; he planned to meet with famed civil rights attorney John Burris on Dec. 29 to discuss filing a lawsuit.

Villarreal claims jail staff failed to provide Gillis with timely medical care, a crucial problem addressed in a $4.8 million federal class-action suit filed by current and former inmates at the jail. The suit was settled in May, with the county agreeing to improve jail conditions.

“It’s very disturbing, I think, that the sheriff’s office is not fixing things faster,” says Ernest Galvan, an attorney involved in the class-action suit. “Having agreed to fixing things is not the same as actually fixing them.”

Galvan says the question in Gillis’ case is whether jail staff responded immediately after something went medically wrong with her.

But even without Gillis’ death being considered in-custody, the jail has a grim tally of five inmate deaths so far this year – nearly triple last year’s count.

“To me, it’s very morbid to discuss the number of inmate deaths,” Landis says. “I think the numbers speak for themselves.”